Random Musings & Book Reviews

We are on the second to the last episode of the Sister Catherine Cesnik murder story and the Fr Joe Maskell sexual assaults and raps in the Netflix show The Keepers. It’s very hard to watch as these high school girls have been brutalized by these two priests, a gynecologist, and a therapist maybe a psychologist. People in the DAs office, the police department, and within the high school itself colluded with the archdiocese and other priests to subvert justice for the teenagers from a Baltimore high school, and a nun who they murdered. Baltimore reminds me of the Southside of Milwaukee or the Southside of Chicago. Very Catholic, priests can do no wrong, the girls are dumb about sex and their own body parts, m let alone what is being done to them.

We’ve been watching an episode a day. Today we drove out to Golden Valley and picked up Mini Me’s phone as he took a Xanax bar and was all messed up, left his phone and keys in a kids car who then got a DWI. The other kid was selling something like 80 Xanax, but didn’t get popped by the cops for more than like 9 pills. The parents told us they police missed numerous pills. And her car was completely pulled apart. It’s unreal to me the shite the police do to personal property but still miss pills.

Next Sunday, ~25 September 2013, it will be 18 months to the day that Amelia Powers underwent “debulking surgery” for the aggressive brain tumour that had manifested, seemingly overnight, on March 28 2012. She had gone to bed alone that night, sobbing, “that deep, quiet crying that you don’t do very often,” upset after an argument with her then boyfriend. Waking in the middle of the night with what felt like a migraine coming on, she discovered, to her distress, that she had vomited in her sleep.

The sickness persisted, along with the headache, both of which she attributed to the “migraine.” It wasn’t until she woke up in an emergency room in Bologna, where she had travelled on business for her luxury, bespoke handbag line (despite having difficulty reading the departures board at the airport) a few days later, that the full force of what might be happening to her hit. Confused and alone, she travelled home to face the worst possible prognosis – this was a grade three anaplastic astrocytoma, the most dangerous form of brain cancer, from which the median survival time – with treatment – is 18 months.

And yet, here we are on Skype, where we have been meeting regularly across time zones since March this year, for me to document her story, and; “there’s nothing wrong with me!” she cries. “I do the Royal Ballet workout every day, I eat no meat, sugar, wheat or dairy. No alcohol. My body isrocking. I was told 100 percent I would die from this, but I feel in perfect health, perfect alignment. I feel…” she drags a hand through her shiny black hair, cropped short after her first round of chemo “…beautiful. According to them, I should be at death’s door.”

It struck me there that her stress, emotional turmoil, perhaps fear of abandonment, all were emotional things that manifested into a very real disease. Trauma in utero and trauma in early childhood all cause disease, but systemically people who were more seriously abused, the abuse leeched into their bodies and set up shop. Years later this cellular destruction caused cancer. Take Emmy’s experience with the terror attacks on the train like a decade ago. Emmy got cancer several years after the terror attack. I believe the trauma of the terror attack settled into her body and helped pave the way for the cancer cells to grow. I would bet that if I interviewed women who have advanced cancers we would find persistent trauma. Take Vicki. She had bullshit going on with her husband, they split, she was diagnosed with cancer cancer and now they’re divorced, and she’s going to lose her ovaries. She has two little ones, with her first son, Thierry, as old as Pea, or close to it.

She drinks alcohol, eats meat, drinks aspartame, and doesn’t believe her nutrition plays a role in cancer. She’d hardly believe that stress causes the problems it does. Some people don’t want to believe that stress and emotions actually play a large role in illness. People like their alcohol though. I can’t have more than one drink, two only if the drink was small (4 oz or less) or it was a super diluted champagne drink. Saturday I had a Champagne and Grapefruit cocktail at Saint Genevieve and it was pretty strong so I had a tiny shiney buzz where everything sparkled for about an hour. I was in a fugue state. It was actually very pleasant. Like a short nap. Or a shopping spree. Here’s more of the article:

“I just want them to be a platform so I can talk about this,” she turns her head to show me the bald patch she refuses to cover up. “I want to be able to talk about how we really heal.”

Because, having repeatedly refused further chemotherapy and radiation to treat her illness, Powers is the latest figurehead in a groundswell movement towards alternative therapies for cancer. In the States, “cancer thriver” Kris Carr has built a mini empire on her story (she is winning her fight against a rare strain of liver and lung cancer through diet alone), while here in the UK Lord Saatchi presented the House of Lords with his Medical Innovation Bill in December last year. Following the sudden death of his wife Josephine Hart from ovarian cancer, he described chemotherapy as “medieval, degrading and ineffective”, and wants doctors to have the choice to offer alternatives.

At present (speaking about his wife); “what you have is a situation where a woman is first tortured and then dies. Why? Because that is what’s required by law.” Not that it’s the doctors’ fault. “Everybody’s doing their level best. But they are inhibited by the prospect of a trial if something goes wrong.” This despite the fact that one doctor admitted to him that an estimated one in 10 people are killed by their cancer treatment.

Powers says she knew “their way” would kill her after one round of chemo. “My skin crawled like it was alive. I lost my hair, had two epileptic reactions. They also put me on steroids because my brain was swelling through my skull.” Met with only more of the same from her doctors, she decided to seek her own alternative. “I found a video on the Huffington Post of a man whose eight-month-old had the same tumour as me. He had treated it with Cannabis oil, and the tumour shrank in four months. Side effects? All it did was make her sleepy.”

More internet research led her to a man she calls the “Wizard of Woodacre,” a 70-year-old healer based in California manufacturing the cannabinoid tincture CBD (the psychoactive constituent THC has been removed) which she’s been taking daily since. Over email, her “Wizard” explains the legality of what they are doing; “In the State of California it’s legal. However, it to the Feds it remains a schedule 1 drug, in the same category as heroin – and supposedly with no medicinal value. Hopefully I’m a small enough operation that I’m under their radar.”

With over 500 clients, including one 37-year-old oncologist, the Wizard says inquiries rocketed after Sanjay Gupta’s CNN documentary on medicinal marijuana aired last month. He has faith that his treatment – which is harvested and blessed in the light of the full moon – “we work on an energetic and spiritual level in addition, and give thanks to the spirit of the plants in the Native American tradition” – will be made legal in his lifetime.

On a very practical level, nutrition is coming to be seen as key in cancer treatment – and prevention. On the Wizard’s recommendation, Powers has switched to a completely alkaline diet, while Laura Bond, who’s blog, Mum’s Not Having Chemo, is being made into a book that’s out in November, says that all her research has shown quitting dairy to be “the final piece in the healing puzzle” for many people. Having interviewed over 60 experts around the world for the book; “sugar and dairy are known as the ‘cancer accelerators.’ Your doctor won’t necessarily tell you that, which really shocked me, but it’s just not in their remit.”

“It can be difficult, because most physicians do not have specialist knowledge of alternative medicines and so may not feel able to supervise,” says Professor Susan Short, one of the few oncologists who would talk to me for this piece (Powers’ own doctors declined to comment). Again, this leads to “fear of litigation,” says Bond – meaning it’s safer to stick to the company line, despite the fact; “the standard treatments we offer are not as effective as we’d like,” admits Short.

She thinks only around five percent of patients refuse chemotherapy, and that while “alternatives provide hope for a better outcome, few have proven benefit. But this approach can make patients feel more in control.” And yet, as ever, she wants me to know that “the agents we use offer the best known approaches to treatment.” People like Powers and her Wizard would disagree. “About 25 percent of my clients have complete healing, 40 percent a moderate healing. These are approximate numbers, but I think they are better than the numbers for most chemo treatments.”

Of course, very limited clinical trials into medicinal marijuana have been done. Conversely, according to Cancer Research in the UK, any type of chemotherapy is tested for ten years minimum before it’s used on patients, while they also point out that the reason clinical trials of medicinal marijuana are limited is because its effectiveness can’t be proven.

But after an MRI back in April appeared to show that her tumour had been stabilized (i.e. there had been no further growth) Amelia was positively floored by her doctor’s reaction; “her answer was, ‘if you’re not going to take our treatment, then please carry on with what you’re doing. I’m really sorry that I can’t give this to you’.” In her eyes, this represented a major victory.

But when a further scan, in July this year, suggested that perhaps there might have been some growth, the prognosis left her reeling. “My doctor said; ‘in our opinion the chemo and radiotherapy didn’t work. But we think you should have a proper go with it.’ Here I am, with my hair gone, my teeth in a mess, periods which are just coming back. They all agree with me – the chemo is palliative. He even admitted; ‘Most patients chose it because they panic’.” Rather than upset, she seemed angry. “In hospital all I hear is negatives; ‘this isn’t working, it’s growing, you are not going to live from this, nobody does, we can’t do anything for you, we don’t know what to do…What the hospitals offer isn’t healing – it’s fear.”

And that is exactly what I’ve been talking about. Doctors,. hospitals, oncologists, nurse care coordinators, they all practice the art of fear. It doesn’t matter whether you have the stress of the American health care system or an NHS-type of governing body, the outcome is the same, doctors don’t discuss nutrition and they peddle fear.